Tracks, Turrets, Armor, and Attitude is half board game and half RTS. It's a tactical, realistic war game (relatively speaking) with each player commanding 10 or more (or less) tanks. Intended for network play, it has good AI so it works for single players also. Available on, and described more fully by, ralphchapin.wordpress.com.

This game is somewhat involved because of the multi-player aspect and because it allows you to design your own tanks and build your own army, but you can play a simple game very quickly. On the website menu, just go to Real Quick Start for the fastest look.

I put this game together over several years, targeting a small group of people. I'm now interested in seeing if it interests anybody else.

Wow, I just took a look at your source code and boy was it complicated and unorganized. You had so many objects all over the place, and I had no idea where the main loop occured or where the entry point of the game was, then I looked into the manifest.mf file and found it obscurely placed in the utils package. I feel like there's a better way to do what you did in checkPhaseWork() in the Game class, instead of creating Objects and casting them to something else later on.However, the game displayed no lag, even though I have no clue how to play it.

The idea to to hold a majority (3 with 2 players) of the control points for a few minutes. Then you win. Or exterminate the enemy. Tanks shoot automatically, but go where you tell them to. Drop the green question mark anywhere that looks interesting and you'll get an explanation.

The source code is complicated, but it is highly organized. The entry point doesn't do anything except create the main window. There's no main loop. I suspect the castings you see are objects being retrieved from collections.

Sorry, but I just wanted to help a little to make the GUI look better, since his game uses a lot of it. So you can f**k off you troll.

I don't see why you consider that a troll "trollwarrior1" My point with the GUI is that it was unnecessary. He didn't ask for help with GUI or anything, so posting a code snippet that he may or may not need is just spamming the thread, especially when you're using specific code snippets, and especially with something as minor as native GUI look and feel.

The source code is complicated, but it is highly organized. The entry point doesn't do anything except create the main window. There's no main loop. I suspect the castings you see are objects being retrieved from collections.

I'd like to apologize on behalf of the rest of the community to ralphchapin for the shabby treatment he's received after newly arriving here. Ralph, I hope you've read enough other threads here to see that the responses you're getting on your showcase thread isn't typical of the community, even for criticism.

I like the abstract look, though I will say if you want to make it look more like a game than a business app (that's what swing does to apps), you'll want at least a little more pizazz in the visual department. But judging by the content you've got on your website, you look like you have quite an ambitious roadmap, and I'd love to see what comes of it.

Thanks for your concern. I will, however, take whatever comments I can get. Destructive criticism is welcome. In particular, if something doesn't work, or is unintelligible, I need to know. All other comments welcome too.

Visual pizazz is important, and I regret the lack. Unfortunately, it takes time and ability and knowledge, all lacking, so it got a lower priority. The business app look is probably as much my fault (I've written a lot of business software) as swing's--to be fair to swing. I'd like to blame it on the nature of the game, but I've seen a bunch of games that ought to have the same problem--lots of little dots running around simple terrain--almost all spaceship games, come to think of it, with absolutely featureless terrain--at least I've got woods, roads, and a river-- (ah hem) --anyway, they manage at least a little bit of pizazz, so I can't claim that excuse.

Hi Ralph,Cool stuff, I like the abstract art too. Clean and crisp. Automatic shooting with less micromanagement is good. The colours work well, nice shades of green.One small criticism, the tanks are too small, hard to click on and they don't get bigger when zooming.I played the single player mode and it was good. Nice work getting multiplayer working.I was working on a game with a similar look but using light and path finding as an attempt to make it more attractive but I lost motivation.By the way, if you want to style up your swing gui, take a look at substance look and feel. It's a bit of an old project and not maintained by the original author anymore but it looks good.

Wow, I just took a look at your source code and boy was it complicated and unorganized.

Where did you see a link to source?

There are ways to decompile a jar and view the source code.

vbrain, think twice before decompiling someone's game source code without permission and then publicly criticising them for how it appears 'disorganised', which is a matter of opinion and is not a relevant criticism when this is not an open source project.

Thanks. The tanks do get a lot bigger, but you have to zoom way in. They're to scale, and each of those squares is a kilometer on a side. So unless you design and build a VERY big tank, it's hard to keep an eye on the battle and on a tank at the same time. (But check out the unit tray.) I'm thinking of using oversized tank images, but until I come up with better visuals for the tanks that's not a big improvement on the dots. On the other hand, it shouldn't be difficult to click on them; tactical skill is what's supposed to matter here, not eye-hand coordination.I actually did multiplayer first. A friend pointed out that a first time player would not want to fire up a host session, an AI session, and a player session before starting his first game, so I mashed them all together.